


Like Water

by blue_wonderer, wonderingtheblue (blue_wonderer)



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Catholic Lance (Voltron), Fluff, Getting Together, Hurt/Comfort, Imprisonment, Keith thinks Lance is just really pretty OK, Lance (Voltron) Angst, Lance (Voltron) Whump, Like actually there is a lot of fluff in this to also have torture in it?, M/M, Non-Graphic Torture, PINING KEITH, Post-Voltron: Legendary Defender Season/Series 07, Protective Keith (Voltron), Recovery, Soft Boys, Voltron Lion to Paladin Psychic Bond, and 15K of me making it up to them, because I was like oh shit wait angst makes me sad, cradling, kosmo is a good boy, lance does yoga, there's actually only like 500 words of torture if that, which is great because Lance thinks Keith is pretty too
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-01-03
Updated: 2019-03-15
Packaged: 2019-10-03 20:09:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 18,182
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17290583
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/blue_wonderer/pseuds/blue_wonderer, https://archiveofourown.org/users/blue_wonderer/pseuds/wonderingtheblue
Summary: There was nothing special about the day that Lance was taken from them.Or: Shortly after the last battle with Sendak, Lance is captured and taken from Earth. Keith and the other Paladins tear apart the universe to find him.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> For an anon ask on my tumblr: "Bad Things happen bingo prompt - Cradling Someone in Their Arms - Lance is brutally tortured by the Galra, the Paladins come to rescue him and Keith cradles Lance in his arms. Can be platonic or Klance."
> 
> I didn't so much focus on the brutal part in favor of highlighting the cradling part ;)

There was nothing special about the day that Lance was taken from them. 

There was nothing special about that day except for the way Lance looked in the morning light on the roof of a Garrison building. Dressed in a loose blue tank top and baggy gym shorts, brown hair still looping in sweaty curls about his temples from an early morning workout, worn and dusty flip-flops haphazardly discarded behind him as if he had walked right out of them before sitting on the ledge and letting his bare feet dangle in the open air. His arms are propped behind him, head tilted back, like a sunflower following the arc of the sun across the dome of the sky. He looks free and careless, unconsciously graceful, and Keith is suddenly hyper-aware of the itch and heat of the Garrison uniform he’s wearing. 

When Keith walks toward him across the rooftop, pulled to Lance like he was drawn to the song of the Blue Lion all that time ago, he temporarily forgets why he was even looking for Lance in the first place. Instead, he gets caught up in the way Lance’s skin seems suffused with the warmth of the morning and the spatter of freckles on his nose and shoulders that dusted his skin like burnished stardust. The cross he always wears around his neck—delicate and golden, something Keith had only managed to glimpse a handful of times altogether, usually right before a battle when Lance would bring it to his lips in silent prayer before tucking it safely away once again—gleamed in the light. 

_”Wow,”_ a deadpan voice that sounds suspiciously like Hunk rolls around in his head. _”Galra Keith is, like, super gay.”_

This is followed by an inner snort that, unsurprisingly, sounds a bit like Pidge. _”Keith is firmly in the Angry But Awkward Gay category. And that’s all Keith, can’t blame his alien genes.”_

_”It’s understandable,”_ and that’s Lance’s voice, sly and irritatingly confident, the ghost of a shitty grin slicing in the shadows of Keith’s mind. _”I mean, have you seen me?”_

(Keith _might_ have developed a super weird and maybe less-than-sane habit of hearing his friends’ voices during the long, long hours-days- _months_ of silence on the space whale. He’s not sure when it started, but it was sooner than he liked to think, when the loneliness turned his bones into dust and stone, when his teeth and tongue ached with the urge to just _say something_ , anything to anyone, just to hear the affirmation of his own existence. Without his say-so, he heard Lance’s voice first. Some barbed, challenging comment he doesn’t even remember, but he does remember the way his heart had soared, how relief burned behind his eyes, and how his stomach plummeted when he realized that it wasn’t real, that he wasn’t back, that he may never, ever hear them again. The voices of the others followed soon after and, even though they weren’t real, even though he should have been worried that he was hearing voices, he had mostly chosen to be content that he had friends out there, that they had been _his_ , and that they were waiting. He was mostly glad that the silence and horrific routine had been broken, if only in his head.

He _should_ definitely be worried now that he’s back and no longer alone in the depths of space and on the edge of time itself and still he occasionally hears the voices of his friends in his head when they’re not around, or when they’re around and not talking. He’s not sure what it means, if it means anything, but figures it’s a hurdle for another, distant day.) 

As Keith approaches, he comes to see the faint bruising left over from their battle under Lance’s arm and across his upper ribs. A swath of mottled skin disappears beneath his shirt and when Lance shifts Keith can see the beginnings of a white bandage that must be covering a wound on his side. There’s a small cut near his temple, pinked with healing skin, the bruising still there though faint. Keith shakes his head, pressing his lips together to stop the hypocritical _“should you really have been training this morning with those injuries?”_ that wants to tumble from his mouth (and, Christ, isn’t that just a _Shiro_ thing to say). Still, Keith’s gut twists at the sight as he feels a resonating ache in his own still-healing injuries, as he feels something bitter and primal and protective shift uncomfortably inside him, seeping from his hindbrain and out until the joints in his hands curl his fingers into tight but ineffective fists.

He can’t fight someone else’s pain. He wishes he could, sometimes. Everything would be so much easier. 

And then Lance drops his head back between his shoulders so he’s looking at Keith upside down, blue eyes bright, a cocky smirk slashing across his mouth. 

“Hey, boss,” Lance says, his voice hoarse in a way that either says he’s tired or been crying or both. Keith’s been away for too long, but he still knows what each of his team members sounds like when they’ve been crying. It’s one of the many things he kept safe in his memories while he was gone, folded up and tucked deep inside him only to reopen it every night before he went to sleep so he’d never, ever forget. That and things like Hunk’s cooking and Pidge’s wry sarcasm and Allura’s pinched lips and the color of Coran’s mustache and Shiro’s tired but happy smile and the feel of Lance falling asleep against him when they were both supposed to be keeping watch during missions. 

“Lance,” Keith says instead of “sharpshooter” or “cargo pilot” because it’s been two years since he’s been able to say Lance’s name—any of their names—and he’s never going to pass up the opportunity to say them again because they’re here and _he’s _here and it’s not a dream this time _it’s not it can’t be_ —__

____

____

“You OK?” Lance asks, tilting his head to the side.

“Stop doing that,” Keith huffs and gestures vaguely at the other boy and his upside-down head when Lance raises a confused eyebrow. “The bending over backwards _Exorcist_ thing.”

Lance, because he’s a little shit, grins and tilts his head back at an even more jarring and impossible angle, the contortionist yoga freak. 

“Contortionist yoga freak,” Keith says out loud because it deserves to be said and plops down beside Lance, swinging his booted feet over the ledge to dangle beside Lance’s. He sort of doesn’t want to turn away from Lance, but he’s been staring too long already so he focuses on the horizon instead. 

There’s not much to look at except for ash and destruction. At least a quarter of the Garrison was turned to rubble during the last battle, the smell of fire and dust and death still lingering in the air more than a week later. The horizon is a constant haze of smoke, a reminder of distant cities still burning with the ghost of war and occupation. 

“You probably didn’t do the routines I showed you while you were on the space whale,” Lance sighs, sitting up so he’s shoulder to shoulder with Keith, the contact carrying Keith’s thoughts away from the ruin at their feet like a cool, gentle current. “All that work and practice wasted.” 

“Why should I? You just made me do yoga so you could laugh at how bad I was at it,” Keith scoffed. 

“Well, yes,” Lance says slowly in that _duh, you moron_ way he has. “I don’t understand how you can be all…” he trails off, shifting so he can wave a long-fingered hand in Keith’s general direction, nearly smacking him in the face. “Flippity and shit when you’re trying to stab someone but you can’t do a downward dog without tipping over like a cow.” 

Unbidden, because Lance always manages to get these kinds of reactions out of him as easy as breathing, Keith’s mouth flies open in indignation. “What do you mean _like a cow_ , I—I have tight hamstrings!” Okay, so, that last bit sounds really stupid and most definitely came out as an actual whine. Keith clenches his teeth to prevent further embarrassment. 

But Lance only quirks a brow and gives him a slow, sultry smirk as blue eyes flick down to Keith’s legs. “Yeah you do, and it’s not the only thing tight about—” 

Keith slams a hand over Lance’s mouth because _what the hell_. Keith might be terrible with social cues, a fact _everyone_ keeps merrily reminding him about, but even he knows from a long history of watching Lance flirt with the entirety of the universe that he was about to hand Keith a terrible line. 

And, seriously. What the hell? Lance hasn’t done that before, has he? Not to him. Right? It’s, yeah, a little funny because Lance is a _dork_ but also something twists ill and unsettled inside him because Lance is rarely _serious_ about his flirting. 

He’s had a long time to think about it, and Keith thinks he’d really like for it to be serious, maybe. Someday. 

Lance cackles behind his hand, warm breath puffing against his palm as the corners of his eyes crinkle with laughter. And it’s sort of picturesque right up until Lance licks him. 

“Ugh,” Keith says, removing his hand and wiping Lance’s spit off on Lance’s shoulder. “Gross.” 

But Lance ignores him, still laughing at him, the beautiful little _dickface_.

“ _Tight hamstrings,_ ” Lance repeats with a slight wheeze. “I’m telling literally everyone I see today about that. It’s happening because it’s my _favorite thing_. I told you all that training and no stretching is not good for you. You are going to tear something and then who will pilot the Black Lion? Coran, probably.” 

Both blink dumbly into the rising sun and then collapse into giggles. Keith’s is more of a light chuckle, but Lance seems drunk with it, swaying into him, pressing his forehead into Keith’s shoulder. Lance proceeds to do frighteningly accurate impersonations of Coran, though, which makes Keith laugh until his still-tender ribs ache. 

He looks up with blurry eyes to see Lance clutching his bruised side too and looking at him with a wide, earnest expression. “Oh my God,” Lance breathes. “You leak when you laugh. It’s so cute.” 

Keith makes an offended noise and reaches up to wipe the tears from his eyes and blames the sun for the heat in his cheeks. “I-I’m not—I mean, gross, don’t call it leaking.”

_”Oh yeah,”_ Pidge’s voice says. _“That’s what you focus on.”_

_”Not that he called you cute or anything,”_ Hunk adds. 

_”Guys, lay off,”_ Shiro’s voice reprimands them, gentle and supportive. _”What else do you expect of an Awkward Gay?”_

Et tu, Brutus? 

Lance chortles again, something surely mocking and sassy cut off suddenly with a flash of light and a startled _”oomph!”_ from Lance as Kosmo pops in from God knows where and pounces on him, sending him rocketing backward. Only a quick gesture from Keith keeps Lance from cracking the back of his skull like an egg on the concrete, but Kosmo is undeterred. He lays his full body over Lance and starts merrily licking at his face and snuffling at his hair. 

“Ugh! My lips touched dog lips!” Lance cries, but the reprimand effortlessly falls into ridiculous baby-talk. “ _Who’s_ a good boy?” Lance ekes between shallow wheezes because Cosmo is fucking heavy, Keith would know. He winces when he remembers that Lance is still bruised and bandaged and a ginormous space wolf lounging on him probably isn’t helping, but Lance is flush with laughter and doesn’t seem to mind. “Who’s a handsome boy? Yes, you, _you are_ , handsome boy with the noble snoot and the fluffy ears. I could just boop your nose, _yes I could_ —” 

Kosmo’s tail wags and his tongue lolls out the side of his massive jaws in a dumb doggy grin and Keith looks on in vague disgust. “Shameless,” he mutters. 

Kosmo turns his gaze on Keith, ears perked as if to say, _“who, me?”_

“Yes, you,” Keith answers and then eyes the way Lance’s long fingers are buried in Kosmo’s thick fur as he pets the wolf vigorously. “And you, too.” 

“He’s just jealous because he wants some of _this_ , too,” Lance says in that same baby talk voice, pressing his nose against Kosmo’s and inviting more slobbery kisses. Keith isn’t sure if Lance is talking about himself or Kosmo. 

“Alright, alright,” Keith says, shoving at Kosmo with one hand. “Off. You’re going to re-break his ribs before we even leave for the mission.” Kosmo grumbles and stands on sinuous legs, shaking out his fur before stepping over and around Lance to lay out on the other side of Keith. 

Lance’s breath is labored as Keith feared, but he still pokes his bottom lip out and makes grabby hands at the wolf. “Stop,” he says, slapping Lance’s hands down. “You’re terrible at impulse control. Don’t cry to me when he punctures your lung.” 

Lance breaks off into another fit of giggles and who knew a grown-ass man could sound like _that_ , Keith is embarrassed for him, he really is. “Oh my God, did you just really say that _I’m_ bad at impulse control?” 

Keith feels his cheeks heat in a way that probably doesn’t have to do with the morning sun after all. He slaps a hand over Lance’s mouth again, hoping to shut him up and maybe suffocate him this time. Lance doesn’t hesitate before licking Keith’s palm, lightning quick reflexes snapping thin but strong fingers around Keith’s wrist and forearm when he tries to pull away from Lance’s tongue. 

“Ugh, why are you like this,” Keith says and tries to shove Lance away, digging his foot into Lance’s hip to try and dislodge him. Kosmo, utterly indignant at being left out, huffs and proceeds to wiggle his way between them to join in on the play fighting. For all his agility in battle, Kosmo is an absolutely clumsy _elephant_ at any other given time. They both end up with a face full of fur and claws scraping uncomfortably against bare skin. He even steps on Lance’s nose and nearly gives Keith a concussion when his hard skull crashes into his forehead.

All three of them end up tumbling away from the ledge, sprawled out and entangled with each other. Kosmo’s fat ass is on Keith’s _face_ while the little traitor lavishes Lance with more wolf kisses. Lance, for his part, is completely breathless from his laughter. He’s curled around his ribs, one arm protecting the bruises while the other flails about to blindly scratch at Kosmo’s ears. 

Keith’s kind of breathless, too, but for a lot of other reasons. Well, mainly just the one reason. 

“Get off,” Keith manages in a mostly commanding tone, enough that Kosmo looks at him from over his shoulder and very slowly moves away, glaring at Keith the whole time in a way that clearly says _”I’m moving because I want to move and not because you told me to, are we clear?”_

“You OK?” Keith asks, hand hovering over Lance but now that they’re not fighting he’s not sure if he’s allowed to touch. 

“My God, man,” Lance says, looking up at Keith with eyes blue like the mirage of water in the desert sun. And then, because it’s Lance, he goes and ruins it. “You snort _and_ leak.” 

“Yeah, you’re fine,” Keith says dryly. 

“Don’t worry,” Lance assures. “Your snorting is both ugly and adorable. It fits with the rest of your aesthetic.” 

“What is _that_ supposed to mean?” 

Lance just grins into the sun, eyes squinched closed. The rise and fall of his chest make the cross around his neck glitter. 

“That’s different.”

Lance arches an eyebrow at him. “Really? I think I usually insult you while also giving you backhanded compliments. It’s our _thing_. Did you forget?” 

“What? No. That’s not what I’m talking about. But thanks for confirming what a shit you are.” 

“I’m a delight,” Lance argues breezily. “So what’s different?” When Keith just stares at him, tongue-tied and trying not to show it, Lance rolls his eyes. “Come on, buddy. Use your words. What’s different?” 

“Your necklace,” Keith blurts out. “It’s different. From before.” Now that he’s close and paying attention, it’s very different. The one before was gold, this one is more of rose gold. The chain is a little thicker than the other one, the cross charm a little bigger.

“Oh,” Lance says, reaching up to wrap his fingers around the cross. “How did you even notice?” He wonders, sitting up and looking down at Keith in puzzlement. Keith sits up, too, but can’t quite meet Lance’s eyes. Instead, he suddenly finds it crucially important to pet Kosmo behind his ears, who grumbles in contentment. 

“I just—you were always careful with it,” Keith shrugs. “Kept it under your armor, tucked under your shirts. Was I—not supposed to talk about it?” 

“No, I—that’s fine. It’s fine. I just—didn’t think you’d pay attention, that’s all.” Lance says softly, looking vulnerable and awkward. He reaches up and fiddles with the necklace, sliding the charm back and forth on the rose gold chain. “Faith is important to my family—well, it’s important to my mom, so that means, by default, it has to be important to the rest of us.” He quirks a fond, crooked smile at this. Keith has yet to officially meet Lance’s family, but he’s heard the rapid, authoritative cascade of Spanish from Lance’s mother and grandmother several times from afar. “Mama gave it to me when I was in middle school, and I wore it because my parents wore theirs because my older siblings wore them. I knew the prayers and the hymns and Ma—mom made me kneel and pray with her at night for _years_ while I was growing up.” 

Lance pauses, his fiddling ceasing. Kosmo rumbles again, plops his massive head on Lance’s knee and looks up at him with baleful eyes. 

“I don’t know. And then we were in space, and the only thing I had of my family—the only thing I had of their faith, my faith—was this. Or, well. The other one. Somehow I kept it intact through everything—though I had to solder it back together after that explosion on Arus. But I kept it until I got back to Earth, ironically.” 

“Did it get damaged in the battle?” 

Lance shrugs. “Lost. I think when I got in that wreck with Veronica. It must have snapped off, got loose from the armor. I didn’t even realize it was gone until everything was over.” 

Keith swallows back that still-fresh panic at the image of Lance, injured from the wreck, taking on the whole goddamned Galra army with just a gun and a shield. “Where did you even find another one?” 

The Galra had occupied Earth for more than a year before Voltron arrived. And the Galra, even fragmented, were age-old conquerors and horrifically efficient. They’d decimated cities, disrupted infrastructure, took over vast swaths of farmland to feed their own armies and to starve out the insurgents, wrangled human survivors into work camps, mined their natural resources, and seized whatever gold and other valuable minerals they could find to fund their systematic destruction of the planet. Keith doubted there was a standing jewelry shop, much less a well-stocked one, anywhere near here. 

“Mom actually bought it before… before the Galra came. Before Blue even took us away. It was supposed to be part of my graduation present from the Garrison. She—held onto it. Through everything.” 

_Everything_ , Keith knew, was a bit of an understatement. He hadn’t gotten the whole story from Lance—but Keith finds himself imagining Lance’s family being told by the Garrison that their son was dead, his mom maybe putting the cross away, unable to sell it or give it to someone else. He imagines the Garrison telling them their son is alive after all, only for the Galra to come and destroy their home. He imagines them fleeing Cuba with little more than the clothes on their backs, finding their way to the underground resistance, and then to the Garrison. All the time Lance’s mom held on to the necklace, a sign of her faith and her faith in Lance, a hope that she and her family would be saved, a hope that her son would return to them someday. 

Keith doesn’t know if he can fathom a faith like that. He didn’t believe in much—he believed in his own strength and, later, he believed in Shiro, and then his team, and the Lions. Sometimes he thinks he might be starting to believe in his mom when she says _”I’ll never leave you like that again”_ , but he’s not quite there yet. He thinks of the times he glimpsed Lance holding the cross to his lips before a battle, the openness of silent prayer on his face, the wash of confidence when he reopened hardened blue eyes, and Keith thinks maybe his kind of faith is different than Lance’s. Weaker. 

There’s a lot of things he wants to say to Lance. Apologies. Explanations. Just to keep _talking_ because, out of everything, that’s what Keith missed the most when he was gone. But if they don’t get moving they’ll be late to their missions, and the world is still so much bigger than Keith, so much bigger than all of them, that he doesn’t have a right to put it on hold to talk to this boy.

It’s not like Keith knows how to put the tumble of unsayable things into words, anyway. Certainly not when faced with the oasis of Lance’s eyes. 

“It looks good on you,” he ends up saying and is surprised by how gentle and proud Lance’s returning smile is. 

“Thanks,” Lance says, before dislodging Kosmo and standing with a slow stretch, filling Keith’s vision with long, brown legs before he reaches down. “Come on, fearless leader. Let’s go be heroes.” 

Keith wraps his hand in Lance’s offered one and lets the other pulled him to his feet. 

For a moment, it feels like falling. 

***

Keith isn’t with Lance the day he was taken from them. 

He’s halfway across the world on a separate mission. They might have defeated Sendak, but there are pockets of Galra troops stranded on Earth, holding entire human work camps hostage, defending their fortresses and capturing food and other resources with desperate, bloody raids. 

Even now, Sendak is dead but still deadly. 

Negotiations were successful with several of the remaining Galra forces—some leaving relatively peacefully, some being absorbed into the thinned ranks of the Blade of Marmora. But there are some that would not negotiate, would not bow to the lower species, would not quake before the might of Voltron, _Vrepit Sa_. 

Striking hard and fast against these last outposts is key, so the Garrison decide—along with Allura and Shiro—to split the Paladins and MFE fighters into a multi-pronged operation. Keith with Pidge in Colorado, which housed the largest remaining Galra stronghold. Allura and Hunk took on a heavily fortified base in Southeast China. Lance, meanwhile, with Veronica and Shiro on a rescue-heavy mission near London. 

Keith wished Lance was at his side—not that working with Pidge wasn’t seamless. Working with any member of his team was effortless like they were an extension of himself. He figured it was some sort of carry-over from their psychic link with Voltron. But he’d fit even more naturally with Lance, the beginnings of the partnership they’d developed before Keith left for the Blade had locked into place as soon as he returned as if he’d never left as if he hadn’t spent two long years away. Lance was laser-focused in battle, calling patterns and tactics, taking down enemies with his keen eye before they even became a threat. He was tenacious, he kept fighting even when the odds were stacked against him. Even if it was just him and his gun against an entire Galra base. Even if it was just him and Red standing between the Earth and certain annihilation. 

Lance gave Keith room to breathe, even in the pitch of battle. 

Or maybe it’s just Keith, tired and sore, mentally and physically battered from the emotional upheaval of the past several weeks, that longs for an extension of the morning he’d spent with Lance in the sun, sinking into Lance’s eyes like water, reflecting his easy smile, smelling his warm skin, giggling together like the world hadn’t collapsed around them. 

“Alpha Team reporting in,” he says when he re-enters Black well after midnight. Sweat stings his eyes, his bruises have bruises, he knows his left knee is swollen and he thinks three fingers on his right hand are broken. “Mission success. Returning to base with rescued prisoners, recovered weapons, and the intel.” 

Silence. 

“This is Alpha Team reporting in. Anyone copy?” 

Silence. 

A black hole of dread swoops low in Keith’s belly. 

“Guys,” he hears Pidge say over the comms, her voice thin and wary. “Not funny.” 

“This is Keith Kogane of Voltron,” Keith enunciates. “Does anyone copy?” 

He hears the click of the comms opening on the other side of the link, but there’s a pause. A deep breath. And then Shiro's voice, it’s firmness doing little to cover the wrecked, terrified quality all packed into one word. 

_“…Keith.”_

Keith isn’t with Lance the day he’s taken from them. He wonders if it would have made a difference. 

***

No one’s entirely sure what went down in London. The Galra had retreated underground, using their former human prisoners as hostages, an impenetrable shield made of blood and bone. It was clear they were doing something, biding their time, but Lance and Shiro’s team couldn’t figure out _what_. 

It all went to shit when the Galra blew the cave systems they were hiding in. Veronica, Lance, and Shiro were separated. Hundreds of captives and soldiers were buried beneath the earth. Veronica’s leg was broken in the chaos, Shiro’s access to the enemy was cut off, leaving him in charge of rescuing the survivors. Something—the explosion or some kind of jamming device—interfered with their comms. 

Lance and a small team of Garrison soldiers were still able to pursue their attackers and the rest of the prisoners. They followed them to a battlecruiser and it became clear that the enemy was either planning to escape with their hostages or collapse the entire system on top of them all while trying. The reports were confusing and fractured after that because they separated. It became clear to Lance and his makeshift team that the battlecruiser was a damaged one from the last battle, one that was being prepped for takeoff. It just wasn’t as clear if the battlecruiser was taking off to escape Earth or to attack it. Lance had sent the soldiers to retrieve the prisoners, and Lance had plunged toward the bridge to stop takeoff. Alone. 

_”Let’s go be heroes.”_

Of course, he had. 

The Red Lion had shown up then, opened a way for Shiro, Veronica, and the remaining soldiers to get everyone on board. Shiro told Keith he’d been so _relieved_ because he thought it was Lance, that he’d somehow looped around for them. He couldn’t raise Lance on the comms but he’d felt the urgency from Red and responded in kind, knowing instinctively that it meant time was somehow running out. 

They didn’t get all of the injured on board before Red shut her doors on them. Shiro had thrown himself at it, digging his fingers at the seal until the nails on his flesh hand ripped backward, knowing there were prisoners and soldiers still trapped, still screaming and clawing at the other side of the doors. And then an unbearable heat and concussive force consumed the cave—more explosions. Earth and fire folded around Red, the roar of destruction pressing up against the lion overshadowing the screams of their injured passengers. 

And then Red moved. Shiro said he barely even registered it before all of a sudden the shaking and noise stopped and he knew they were in the air, safe and away from a certain death they left the other survivors to face.

Shiro had run to the cockpit then, screaming for Lance to _turn around_ , they had to go _back_ , and knowing full well that it was impossible, that they had done all that they could. But the cockpit had been empty, the harness swinging from the pilot’s chair, the view screens blank because Red didn’t need it to pilot herself. Blank except for one image. A battlecruiser, situated behind them, breaking through the atmosphere. 

Escaping.

At first, Shiro thought that Lance was behind with the other prisoners and soldiers, buried alive under the rubble, broken and alone and probably _dead_. But then he heard Red’s song through his bond with Voltron. It was angry and keening. A long, mournful note that boiled and shimmered like the heart of a fire. He looked again to the image of the battlecruiser leaving Earth’s atmosphere and he suddenly understood. He understood because Red understood because Red’s song couldn’t mean anything but frustration and helplessness as her Paladin was taken away from her and to the stars while she flew in the opposite direction. 

The Galra had escaped and Lance was with them. Shiro didn’t know if it was an accident if Lance didn’t mean to still be on that ship. He didn’t know if the Galra had captured him—a Paladin of Voltron was the ultimate insurance policy that they wouldn’t just shoot the battlecruiser down. A Paladin caught meant cutting off a limb of Voltron before it could even form to retaliate. 

Shiro said he’d never heard Red as clearly as he did that day. Not words, but a profound sense of loss and rage as her Paladin, a piece of her cosmic soul, was taken away from her, from her pride. 

And Red couldn’t follow, even when Shiro fell to his knees next to the pilot’s chair and _begged_ , his forehead pressed against the metal of the console, human hand trembling as he ineffectively tugged at her controls. Because there were dying people in her cargo hold and Lance’s last command of her was to keep them safe. 

_”Let’s go be heroes.”_

Of course, it was.

 

TBC


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The rescue

Team Voltron leaves Earth while Veronica is still unconscious at the Garrison’s hospital, leg in a cast and hooked up to various machines. She's, ironically, in the same room Lance was in just a couple of weeks before. The picture Keith glimpses is the same as only a few weeks before as well--except this time it's Veronica instead of Lance, surrounded by her family, all shell-shocked and white-lipped. 

Keith and the others don't have much time to sympathize with the McClain's. They spend as little time at the Garrison as possible after Lance's capture—only long enough to debrief, regroup, pack, and run for their Lions. Still, it’s hours before they can launch, and that's hours too long in this vast and endless universe. Lance's trail is cold before they can even leave Earth's atmosphere. It doesn't help that there is no signal from Lance's armor to track. 

They decide to leave Coran and Romelle at the Garrison, though both fight hard to go with them. But they both were needed for final repairs to the Atlas, and to try to get more information from Luca, the Altean they’d recovered from the battle. There was also no one else they trusted more to watch over their home while they had to leave it abruptly. 

The biggest roadblock actually centers around Shiro. There was no question that he was going to fly with them to find Lance. They all felt it in their bond with each other, where Shiro still resided with them even though he no longer operated a Lion. It was an instinctual drive to _go_ , to hunt together as a pride, to recover their lost member and make themselves whole again. So, after the mission reports, Shiro was packing alongside the rest of them. 

The Garrison had other ideas. 

As captain of the Atlas, Shiro’s been re-trenched in military protocols and red tape while the Paladins remain on the fringe of the command structure. The Garrison higher-ups pull this red tape, try to lay a noose around Shiro’s neck. They call Shiro, along with Iverson, to a private meeting, barring the Paladins from entry. 

Shiro is gone for precisely eight minutes before he bursts into Keith’s quarters, red-faced and out of breath and scaring the ever-loving hell out of an already on-edge Keith.

"Are you--" Shiro wheezes through heaving breaths before he visibly swallows. "Are you done packing--Keith, what are you doing with that pillow?" 

Keith blinks, peeking from around his ~~bed pillow~~ shield and dropping his bayard back on his bed as he relaxes out of his fighting stance. "What the hell, Shiro. Did you _run_ here all the way from Command? Why? Isn't your meeting now?"

“About that," Shiro says, grabbing Keith's bag from the foot of his bed and stuffing whatever was within reach into it. "We have to go. Now.” 

“What the hell, I don’t need that pillow, Shiro, it’s going to take up too much—that umbrella won’t even fit—give me that!” He exclaims, snatching the bag back when Shiro picks up the nightstand with the apparent intention to try and put it in Keith's duffel. 

“Great!” Shiro says, grabbing Keith by the shoulder and pulling him out. Keith barely manages to snatch his bayard in the whirlwind. “You’re ready. Let’s go. Guys, you hear that?” He says, pulling out his communicator. “We gotta go _now_.” 

“What is going on—Shiro, I didn’t finish putting on my armor!” Shiro doesn’t break stride, grabbing Keith’s boot with his robot arm as they explode out Keith’s door. 

They break right, but Shiro skids to a halt when six MPs round the corner at the end of the hall with bullet-proof vests and their weapons drawn. 

“Takashi Shirogane—” one of them shouts. 

“Shiro…?” Keith says, wary. 

“You’re under arrest—” 

“… _Shiro?!_ ”

“Wrong way, sorry!” Shiro says, pulling on Keith once again to turn around and sprint in the other direction. Keith has his bag tucked under one arm, his bare foot slapping on the floor drowned out by the thunder of the men rushing after them. “This way is _much_ better.” 

“Shiro!” Keith says, still confused, but his pop didn’t raise no fool. If someone was chasing you, you either fought them to make them stop or you outran them. They didn’t have time for option one. Lance didn’t have time. Besides, he trusted Shiro. 

Shiro tells him later that the Garrison had tried to get Shiro to stay behind. Tried to get Shiro to convince _Voltron_ to stay behind. Without Lance. 

_“You can’t abandon your home planet for the fate of one boy. If you go, you’ll face a court-martial. You could be stripped of your rank!”_

But Shiro’s never been good with ultimatums. 

_“Then I guess you're finding someone else to pilot the Atlas. Good luck with that.”_

And when the guards had moved to arrest Shiro, Iverson stood between him and the officers. 

_“For the record,”_ Shiro had said with one foot out the door. _“That boy is Lance McClain, and he’s a savior of the universe. What will happen to Earth if we don’t save him?”_

He and Shiro take one quick detour through the Garrison's hospital on their way out—it has nothing to do with throwing the MPs off of their trail, though it’s an added benefit. That’s when Keith manages to see the McClain family crowded around Veronica. Lance’s mom is in a chair on the corner, her fingers pressing her own cross necklace to her chest. She stares at Veronica, through her, and her lips are moving minimally like she’s singing a song to herself. 

Or maybe this is what someone looks like when all they have left is prayer. 

That’s all he sees before a man is filling the doorframe. He’s tall like Lance, taller than Shiro, with similar features but broader in the shoulders, skin sun-worn and leathery, cheeks flushed dark with anger. Keith’s not sure if it’s Lance’s father or an uncle or what he could possibly be to Lance or Veronica, but the fury in his face is so raw that it makes Keith flinch. In front of that anger, in front of the pain and worry in the room, Keith feels childish standing there with one bare foot, clutching a half-opened bag with his friend clearly carrying his shoe while they’re on the run from the Garrison. What reassurances could he possibly offer as he is?

The man in the doorway seems to question the same thing. “Haven’t you done enough?” he grouses, accent thick, before closing the door in their faces. He doesn’t even slam it, just closes it gently, but the click of the door shutting echoes like a gunshot in the hall. 

Shiro’s breath shudders and Keith reaches out, gripping Shiro’s upper arm in a bruising, grounding grip. “It is _not_ your fault,” Keith hisses. “It’s _not_. Don’t even think it, Shiro.” 

Keith can see Shiro swallow. He’s pale. There’s a scabbed-over wound on his jaw and chin from the explosion that separated him from Lance all those hours ago. There’s still ash and dust in his hair, and Keith hasn’t failed to notice how he’s favoring his right side. 

Shiro finally meets his gaze, and his expression is complicated, his eyes wet and _tired_ , but the set to his jaw tells Keith just how angry and desperate Shiro is. “It’s not your fault, either,” Shiro says, just as fiercely. “And we’re going to find him. We’re going to get him back and end this war.” 

They sprint out of the hospital, garnering hisses and glares from nurses and doctors alike. Shiro looks back toward the closed door because he won’t stop thinking that Lance’s family was right, that it was his fault. Keith doesn’t look back, for Shiro’s sake. 

Keith plans to let Shiro ride in Black while he takes Red, but Red won’t let anyone in. They don’t have time to waste cajoling and pleading with her, so Keith pushes Shiro in Black and they take off, prepared to leave Red behind. Prepared to face the upcoming battles unable to form Voltron—there wasn’t a guarantee that they would be able to, even if Black did let Shiro fly her again. 

But when the team breaks the atmosphere, Red is there in their formation, flying herself. Allura gasps in wonder at it, but it gives Keith a fierce sense of hope. 

Red won’t give up until she gets Lance back. She might not let him in for a while as some sort of petulant payback for abandoning her after she does retrieve Lance, but she won’t stop flying until Lance is hers again. He's not sure if these are Red's thoughts or his own, he just _knows_ it to be true. Knows it like he knows how to breathe. 

Voltron blazes across the universe, chasing down Lance and his captors like eternal comets arching across the heavens. Keith thinks to himself and then later out loud to Hunk that they seem to run after Lance with more ferocity than they raced home to Earth just months before. Or maybe that was only Keith. 

To him, Lance _is_ home, like _ShiroRedAlluraHunkPidgeBlack_ is home. But Lance with his soft morning smiles and biting wit, with his quiet but unshakable faith, his tangle of insecurities and his loud boasting, the startling moments of vulnerability sandwiched between his easy competence and confidence, his skin care routines and the way he curls up and falls asleep in any position… 

Lance is more home than anyone else. 

And Keith knows about home. He never had one, not the perfect TV kind of house and family with a dog and a cat he used to dream about, but that’s what made him sure he knew was home was supposed to be. Keith had spent _years_ chasing after one—chased it across galaxies, immersed himself in an entirely alien culture, worked himself to the bone, bathed himself in blood, exiled himself only to realize home was behind him. He knows what _home_ looks like for him. He’d never, ever stop until he had it again. 

Usually, the presence of the other Lions was felt but muted in their bond. Like knowing someone was in the room but not seeing or hearing them. But ever since Lance was taken, Red made her presence known to Keith, some days even louder than he felt Black. She seemed to move at all times, restless and sleepless and _relentless_ , a wildness about her that was almost manic. Keith had the infinite impression of her pressing up against the cage of his head hole, all sinew and muscle, fang and claw. An eldritch dread straining to just break free from their formation to _run and run_ until she had _**Her Paladin Her pilot Her boy mineminemine**_. 

Red sang until Keith’s nerves burned under his skin. She sang until her song was the only thing in his head. 

Kosmo pace-teleports frequently during the first several hours of flight. He noses about the cockpit, which is really too small for him to be moving so much, his shoulders and haunches constantly jostling Keith’s elbows. He nearly knocks Shiro down with a clumsy turn. And then Kosmo starts wandering further and further out—blinking out with a flash of blue space dust for a few minutes before blinking back. 

More time stretches between teleports and Keith starts to worry about Kosmo may be getting in to. 

“Anyone seen my wolf?” He asks over their public comms. Behind him, Shiro sighs, clapping the back of the pilot's chair twice before wandering off to see if Kosmo snuck in Shiro's bed again. 

A chorus of negatives answer him, and Keith frowns in confusion. 

Then a blinking notification pops up on his screen, and he accepts. It’s a video feed of Red’s cockpit. The pilot’s chair is still achingly empty, the harness swinging over the side, the lights dim. 

“Red?” Keith asks, feeling chills crawl up the back of his neck. “Is that you?” 

And then Kosmo shoulders past the camera. 

"Kosmo!" Keith calls. 

Kosmo reappears back in the frame, ears perked as he looks around the cockpit in a confused manner, apparently trying to figure out where he heard Keith's voice. 

Keith rolls his eyes. "Kosmo! Come back here!" 

Kosmo gives no indication he heard, bending his head to sniff at the pilot's chair and the console, the microphone picking up his wet sniffles and snorts. Keith glimpses blazing blue markings before Kosmo is shoving his nose directly against the camera lens, blacking out everyone's view. 

And then he sneezes. All over the lens. 

“Nice,” Keith sighs, unamused. 

As if Kosmo is aware of the camera, which Keith honestly doesn't put past him, the wolf backs up enough so Keith can see most of his face. His tongue lolls out of his mouth in a dumb doggy grin. 

“Gross,” Pidge says. “Your dog is super fluffy and cute, but I’m not cleaning that.” 

“What’s he doing in there?” Hunk asks as Shiro returns behind Keith and leans over his shoulder to watch. 

“Hey, boy,” Keith says, gently, smiling tiredly when Kosmo cocks his head. “What are you doing there?” 

Kosmo’s ears tilt forward, and he whines once, small and short, before turning around and disappearing out of the frame. 

“…do you think he’s looking for Lance?” Pidge asks, voice small. 

Kosmo passes by the frame again, head bent down and nose to the ground, following a dizzying circle of a trail before falling out of the screen once again. 

“Yeah,” Keith says, throat tight. “I think maybe he is.” 

There’s a flash of light at the corner of the screen, and then Kosmo is gone, continuing his vain search. 

They push themselves to their limits. They’re low on supplies, morale, and patience when they land on the planet Haj'dha several weeks after Lance is taken from them. They usually only stop briefly at Coalition planets or swap moons for supplies, but this time they decide to stay a full day and night for more rest. The Adit, the local people in the region Voltron lands, generously offers them accommodations. Though the call of a real bed is tempting, they ultimately turn it down. No one on the team, including Allura and Hunk, is good company right now. The thought of being surrounded by strangers as well as confining walls after weeks of being cramped in their Lions is enough to suffocate Keith. The Adit seemed to understand and were quick to organize provisions, though they were still recovering from Galra occupation and were probably low on rations themselves. However, the Adit didn't hesitate to overload the Paladins with food, clothes and blankets, and medical supplies. 

Most importantly, the Adit promised to report in if they heard any news about Lance. 

They camp that night just outside of the Adit's capital, dragging their mattresses from the Lions so they can lie by a real fire under the stars, comfortable in the lush blankets and pillows provided by their hosts. The Lions form a protective perimeter around them, standing sentinel against the press of night. A canopy of stars arcs richly above them, eternal and breathtaking. 

“OK,” Hunk sighs from Keith's left. “I’m going to say it, even if it makes me sound crazy. But does everyone hear Red or is it just me?” 

Keith spends too long blinking up at the riot of stars above them before he realizes Hunk’s voice was _outside_ of his head. With Lance gone, everything had been still and quiet, life with the sound on mute, with everyone not having the energy to talk much outside of planning and strategizing. As a result, the made-up voices of his team that he grew used to on the space whale resurfaced once again as he desperately wished for someone, _anyone_ to break the unbearable silence. 

“Thank God,” Pidge breathes out, turning on her mattress, so she’s up on her elbows and staring at Hunk across the fire, squinting against the warm light. “I thought it was, I don’t know, hallucinations from the lack of sleep.” 

“I thought it was because I was her Paladin once,” Keith admits. 

“Even I hear her,” Shiro says. “It goes on and on, even in my dreams.” 

“I hear her, too,” Allura agrees. “But after the events on Earth, I hear all the Lions.” 

“Me, too,” Pidge says. “Something must have happened, I’ve only ever heard Green before.” 

“Man, everything was so crazy I don’t even know when it started,” Hunk says. "And I should be way more worried about it than I am. I mean. Multiple voices in your head, right? Has to be the lack of sleep. Honestly, though, totally not the weirdest thing, you know?" 

“It has to be because you guys bonded with your Lions so well during those last days on Earth—like calling them from Saturn,” Shiro muses. 

“Or piloting them from Sendak’s ship like some wacky virtual reality platform,” Keith adds. 

“We certainly opened up our consciousness to the Lions in a way that we hadn’t accomplished before—in a way the First Paladins didn’t accomplish, either, I believe," Allura says. Her next words are quieter like she's contemplating more to herself than to them. "I’m beginning to think that there are no real limits to what Voltron and the bond between Lions and Paladins can accomplish.” 

“I don't know if it's because I spent so much time with Black in the Astral Plane or maybe because the Paladin bond never goes away, but it seems I’m along for the ride,” Shiro says, sounding unsure of how he feels the situation. "At least when it comes to Red." 

“Yellow is still the loudest to me, I can hear her clearer than anything,” Hunk says. “But the others are like voices in another room, you know, but like comforting. Like waking up in your room and hearing your parents talk while they make breakfast, but not being able to hear the exact words they're saying.” 

“Yeah, there’s that’s,” Pidge says, thoughtful. “But it’s also creepy.” 

“And invasive as hell,” Keith adds moodily, frowning when Shiro's arm flops over the space between them to nudge his shoulder. 

And above them, roaring the loudest, was the Red Lion. Her consciousness pressed on them at all times, unrelenting, never giving her mourning-tinted rage a goddamned _break_. 

“Kind of don’t blame her,” Hunk sighs, sitting up on his mattress and wrapping a blanket around his shoulders, rapidly losing interest in sleep in favor of gazing at the fire. The stew he’d made for them still sits next to it, it’s rich scent floating over the campsite though none of them had felt like eating much of it. “If I could scream for eternity, you know, without having to sleep or lose my voice, I would.” 

Keith thinks about some sort of pep talk, maybe. Shiro might have done it if he were the Black Paladin still—except Shiro _is_ here, but doesn’t offer his voice. Instead, he sits and stares at the hands in his lap. The guilt Shiro wears is a cloying, visceral thing that haunts their fragile little circle and climbs coldly up their spines. Keith presses his lips together, fighting down another wave of frustration and tangled anger he has no room to process between Red’s never-ending song and the pile of worries and horrific what-ifs. The fact is that words aren’t Keith’s thing. He wishes he had them. For Hunk. For Shiro. For himself. 

“I would, too,” he ends up blurting out and feels oddly relieved at the admission of weakness. “I would, too. It’s all I’ve wanted to do for… a long time now.” 

“Maybe Red’s screaming so we don’t have to,” Pidge croaks. No one voices that Red may be screaming _for_ Lance, because he can’t, because he _is_ and his friends can’t hear him. Maybe Hunk and Pidge and the others haven’t thought about it. Shiro’s probably thought about it.

“It means he’s not… you know, dead… right?” Hunk asks, voice small and wavering. “It’d be different if he was gone, right?” 

“She’s been getting louder over the past few weeks,” Allura says, her complexion sallow and tired even in the glow of starlight and fire. “I think she’s honing in. Maybe we’re getting closer. I don’t think she’d be driving us forward like this if he was—if it was… different.” 

“Yeah,” Hunk says, relieved to latch on to something hopeful, no matter how much of a stretch it is. “Maybe she’s got a radar. A Lance-dar.” 

There are some weak, crooked smiles at that. 

Keith realizes it’s the first time they’ve said Lance’s name out loud in weeks. He wonders why that is if they’re trying so hard to find him. Maybe it’s a superstition thing like if they speak Lance’s name out loud, they’ll bring whatever dark luck to bear on him. 

Keith’s not sure who’s the first one to move, he thinks it might be Pidge, but all of a sudden Shiro’s mattress is bumping against his left side just as Allura pushes hers against his right. They slide all of their beds together, rearrange blankets, and then all of a sudden they’re a messy dog pile of limbs. However it happens, Pidge’s head digs into his stomach, and Keith curls against Shiro with Kosmo plopped over them, the heat of his body too warm but also too soft and reassuring for Keith to shoo him away. Hunk and Allura curl their fingers into skin and clothes, anchoring the whole mess of them down as if one of them might disappear into space as soon as they closed their eyes.

It was the first night since Lance was taken that any of them got any real sleep. 

***

It takes way too long to find Lance. Days turn into weeks, weeks into months. They probably wouldn’t really keep track of time at all if they all weren’t aware of the time crawling by where _Lance wasn’t here_. The great irony is that Voltron’s past effectiveness was now hindering their search for Lance. The Galra Empire was dissolving into incohesive fragments. Even Voltron’s three-year disappearance was not enough for the Empire to stitch itself back together again. Now it was a patchwork of pirates and factions, riddled through with tyrants and rebels and revolutions, eating itself from the inside out. Warlords still conquered planets, but even more civilizations threw off the yoke of Galran rule. 

This is a problem. Before, when the Galra were a homogeneous war machine under the guidance of Zarkon, the information, while sometimes hard to retrieve, was at least accessible and up-to-date, militarized and codified. 

With the Empire so splintered, with the balance of power ever-shifting as one coup and revolution piled on top of countless others, with secret alliances and whispered backroom meetings and pirate dealings with warring factions, things shift and change too much for Pidge to hack. Half of the time there isn’t even an electronic trail to follow. And though Kolivan and Krolia have done much in a short amount of time to shore up the tattered threads of the Blade of Marmora’s intelligence network, the fact is that they are not what they once were. The Blade's spies aren’t as many, and their communication lines are just as disrupted as the Empire's. 

They stay three steps behind the Galra who took Lance for far too long. Red takes them to their first real lead—a ship graveyard orbiting a massive, uninhabited red gas planet. 

“Red?” Keith asks out loud, temporarily stupid as to why she would lead them _here_ of all places. A sharp gasp comes from Shiro, who scrambles to stand up behind Keith and lean over his shoulder to peer at Black’s view screens. 

“Oh no,” Shiro says, lips pale and Keith feels himself go numb. “Pidge? Can you—I think that’s—” 

“What?” Hunk says, echoing Keith’s own thoughts. “What is it? Tell me.”

“Are you sure?” Allura asks, devastated.

“Scanning now,” Pidge says at the same time. 

“Scanning for what,” Hunk says, voice rising in pitch. “ _Shiro._ ”

“It’s the ship that took Lance,” Pidge’s voice cuts through the rising chatter. 

It goes deathly quiet over the comms. Keith doesn’t have to hear Hunk to know the tears are sliding down his cheeks, doesn’t have to see Pidge to know her knuckles were white on her controls. He could feel an echo of an echo of Allura’s abject horror through the bond. 

But Shiro’s in Black with him, so he feels it when Shiro’s forehead rests on Keith’s shoulder, catches the reverberation of a full-body shudder in his own bones. “Keith,” Shiro whispers, voice thin and strung out. “I’m sorry.” 

Keith is going to be sick. 

And then Red’s thoughts break the suspended moment of dread, thrums in Keith like a heartbeat of hope. 

_**Not here. AliveAliveAlive.**_

“Did anyone else feel that?” Keith asks. Shiro raises his head from Keith, grips the back of the pilot’s chair until it creaks under mechanical fingers. The Lions don’t speak in words. It’s images and thoughts and instinct and sometimes, most of the time, it’s hard to parse out what is Lion and what is your own wishful thinking. “ _Did anyone else feel that?_ ”

“Yes,” Hunk says, his sobs taking on a note of relief. “Yes, oh my God, yes.” 

They spend precious hours digging through the ghostly ruins of the battlecruiser to find clues. But even though they hardly know where to start, to think Lance dead and then realize he’s alive, to feel the resonance of his life force in the marrow of their bond with each other, they’re almost giddy with relief. 

“Nothing here—hey, it’s sort of like we’re the Scooby gang looking for clues,” Hunk muses over the comms. He's beside Keith, all of them having evacuated their Lions and split into groups to explore the remains. “Find anything in the databanks, Pidge?” 

“Shiro is Fred, clearly,” Pidge says. “Because he's so freaking wholesome. Also, systems are blown to hell. I’ll try to get what I can, but it may be too corrupted,” she cautions. 

“If I’m Fred then you’re Velma, Pidge,” Shiro joins in. 

“A vertically challenged super genius with questionable fashion sense and neverending snarky comments?” Pidge asks. “Sounds about right. Allura’s Daphne.” 

“Who?” Allura asks, understandably wary from being pulled into obscure human culture references in the past. 

“The queen of the show,” Pidge supplies while Hunk hums in agreement. 

“Oh, well, that’s acceptable. Who is Hunk?” 

“Shaggy,” Hunk answers promptly. “Because I get scared like he does and also I really love food.” 

Keith bumps Hunk’s shoulder with his own—a real feat considering they’re floating without gravity outside the hull of a busted cruiser. 

“I don’t know, big guy,” Keith says. “Sometimes I think you’re the bravest of us all.” 

It’s the first real smile Keith has seen from Hunk in too long, and it’s a shame that it fades as soon as it blooms. 

“Lance would say that he’s Daphne, too,” Hunk says tightly. “Or Daphne’s twin. Because he’s pretty enough to be and has better a fashion sense than all of us combined.” 

“He’d call me Shaggy,” Keith whispers. 

“Because of your mullet,” Pidge adds, just as quietly. 

The comms go silent. 

Sober and aching with a silence that is harder and harder to bear, they gather what they can from the wreckage, but it’s not much. Evidence of more Galra, but it could be anyone—a competing warlord, another faction, or even pirates like Zethrid and Ezor.

(Keith finds himself sort of hoping it’s Zethrid and Ezor because they’ve escaped them before, they’re an enemy Keith knows. But then he thinks back to the scars Zethrid wore, he thinks back to their manic desperation when they looked into each other’s eyes, and Keith thinks that maybe he doesn’t want Lance to be with them, after all.) 

***

The deeper into space they go, the more they have to fight. Mercenary pirates at first and then, as they encroach into old Empire territories, warlords vying for power. They run when they can, but engage when there’s a threat to a planet, the rebels or Coalition, or any potential innocents. Even as his blood sings during each battle, Keith chafes at them. It feels good to fight, to let his battle cry mingle with Black’s roar. But every moment spent in war is a moment that Lance is gone. 

The warlords are the worst, especially ones that still have a large fleet at their disposal. Fighting without Voltron means long, grueling hours of battle. Pidge gets hit, badly, in one such conflict and is sent crashing to the planet they're protecting. She spends two days in the pod they brought with them, and it takes three days more for Green to be strong enough to fly again. 

In the end, it’s his mother and Acxa who finally turn the tides with two pieces of intel gained at different times. 

Krolia sends him a message about the Iktauel, a rising political party that had consolidated significant power in the Galra systems. “Iktauel” did not have a direct translation into English, being a derivative of an ancient Galran language, but it roughly meant “sun star.” As in, the Iktauel’s unifying message was that the Galra was the sun of the entire universe, around which other galaxies and lifeforms revolved. The Galra had unified the universe, whole systems knew nothing but Galran rule and culture, they had a _right_ to power.

Reading over Iktauel propaganda Krolia and the Blade collected makes Keith ill, causes an icy weight of ice to sink in his bones. He starts to suspect that no matter how strong Voltron is, no matter how much they fight, no matter what they sacrifice, the war will never be over. There’s no _winning_ a ten-thousand-year-old war. 

“But how is this helping Lance?” Keith asks, bewildered, as he chats with his mother via vidphone while he skims through the files she sent. They’ve landed on another planet, hoping to gather supplies and intel. Keith had wandered off several yards from their campsite to talk to his mom. 

“The Iktauel is relevant,” Krolia insists when Keith just gives her a _politely_ impatient look. “To you, to the Coalition, and to Voltron. It could be the next enemy you have to face, after Honerva. _And,_ ” she emphasizes when Keith’s attention starts to wander. “The Ikteye, the militant arm of the Iktauel, was reported to have encountered a Galran battlecruiser on the outskirts of the Darinell system.” 

“That’s where we found the remains of the ship that took Lance,” Keith says, eyes widening as Krolia nods. 

“The Ikteye are the ones who destroyed that ship,” Krolia confirms. “The Iktauel Party broadcasted heavily edited footage of the battle across several systems, claiming that Sendak’s army were traitors because they ran from battle instead of towards it and that they brought shame upon the Galra because they were defeated by a backwater planet.” Krolia pauses, making sure that it sinks in before continuing. “The broadcast was a show of how the last of Sendak’s army was decimated for their cowardice. Reports are vague after that, but I am pretty sure evidence points toward the Ikteye retrieving an important prisoner of war from that battleship before it was destroyed.” 

“Lance,” Keith breathes. Krolia presses her lips together, solemn. 

“He would be the most sought-after prisoner of war at this point—Keith!” Krolia barks, startled when Keith leaps to his feet and sends the camera for the vidphone topsy-turvy as he crashes through the small copse of trees separating him from the rest of the campsite. “Keith—what are you doing?” Her voice mixes with the sound of his boots thudding on the ground and wind rushing past his ears. 

“I’m going to get the others!” 

The data they gathered from the remains of the battlecruiser Red found was destroyed or corrupted, as they had feared. But Pidge was able to recover enough logs to confirm Krolia’s intel. A prisoner of had been taken from Sendak’s soldiers shortly before it was destroyed. 

On the heels of this information came Acxa, who could not infiltrate close enough to the inner workings of Iktauel to verify Lance’s location on such short notice. However, she did relay that there was a very high-profile trial scheduled within the next three movements. There were no details on who was being put on trial, but when connected to Krolia’s information, it wasn’t a stretch to guess that it could be Lance. 

When Acxa’s intelligence showed that Iktauel only planned for a farce of a trial, that they were going to very publicly execute their hapless defendant no matter what, then their conjectures that it was Lance was only strengthened. Iktauel were going to get what information they could about Voltron and Altean magic from Lance before making a demonstration out of him as a display of Iktauel’s divine power. They were going to destroy what Zarkon couldn’t, what Lotor couldn’t—a Paladin of Voltron. With such a thing accomplished before the eyes of the Galra, it was unlikely that any of the other factions and parties would be serious contenders for sovereignty. 

_”Let’s go be heroes.”_

Lance always wanted the parades and the thanks, but more than that he wanted to help people, to stop the war and bloodshed, to support and protect his friends. He tried to give whole civilizations he didn’t know and had no investment in a real shot at _freedom_. Now Lance was going to be a martyr. Now he was going to be reduced to a mere piece on the chessboard, used and cast aside, a crutch to uphold something he would probably despise. 

But Keith remembers that morning on the rooftop with the sun woven into Lance’s skin, giggling with Keith until he was breathless, looking at him in the morning light until Keith was sure he was going to sink into those eyes like water. He thinks of the cross glimmering around Lance’s neck, the faith and family and hope it embodies, the way Lance sometimes brings the cross up to his lips for a kiss like it’s a wordless prayer. 

Lance wasn’t a hero or a martyr or a villain to be publicly humiliated and executed for the Iktauel. He was _Lance_ , and Keith was going to save him before the Galra erased the boy with the sunshine smile and stars in his eyes. 

***

The day they save Lance, much like the day they saved Shiro from the Garrison, is a surreal experience framed with blurry edges. 

First, they try diplomacy. They are still Voltron, and Voltron is trying to stop a war. Keith doesn’t ignore Allura’s request that they _try_ like he would have a few years ago, mostly because he has Lance in his head telling him that he can’t abandon the team, can’t leave them vulnerable by rushing in headfirst. This time, unlike the time back with Lotor, Keith listens. 

It takes too many long, sleepless hours to coordinate, but they bring the plea for Lance’s release to the Iktauel not as Voltron, but as the Coalition. The freed planets are quick to come to the aid of one of their saviors and form a united front. 

The Iktauel don’t give their calls for correspondence the time of day. The Coalition gets shoved through a line of pencil pushers and politicians so far down on the totem pole it’s insulting. In other words, their call for diplomacy and negotiations go straight to voicemail, and the Iktauel’s inbox is full. Which is fine with Keith, in the end. 

Voltron attacks twenty minutes after the failed attempts at diplomacy. 

Their plan had been set before the peace attempts even started, knowing they’d have to act quickly if diplomacy failed in case the Iktauel sped up the timetable of Lance’s trial and execution in retaliation. In the minutes leading up to their attack, Keith finds himself so wired it feels like his feet don’t touch the ground when he walks. Time passes by in long, miserable stretches punctuated by confusingly short bursts leaving Keith checking his watch to re-orient himself. This day is what Keith and the others have wanted for months now. This day is what they dreamt about, and now that it’s here he doesn’t know what to do with himself. 

He doesn’t know if it’s pre-battle numbness, a sort of distancing from oneself even as his senses hyperfocus, but Keith can’t bring himself to be afraid. He won’t lose Lance or anyone else today. They’re going to _win_. 

Voltron, aided by volunteers from the Blade and the Coalition, breaks upon the Ikteye stronghold like a hurricane. Team Voltron rushes into the prison in perfect formation. Battle is a well-worn armor to them, so much so that it almost feels like any other mission. Hunk takes the lead—it’s not the first time, but it’s the first time he dared anyone else to do it. It’s almost comical how the Ikteye soldiers sort of balk and collapse under the steady barrage of Hunk’s bayard. His gun mows down the first wave, disperses the deluge of Ikteye, so it’s not just one single-minded monster surging at them but soldiers, incautious and weakened. Shiro and Keith flank Hunk, meeting head on the streams of soldiers that split from Hunk’s frontal attack. Pidge and Allura guard their backs.

They all know that without Lance they’re vulnerable in a way they aren’t usually. Lance is their eye in the sky, their support, picking off threats before they’re even close enough to cause harm. Still, they work together in a way they have never accomplished before. 

Ever since the battle for Earth where each of them essentially leveled up on a spiritual level with their Lions, the bond between the Paladins themselves changed as well. There’s no way for Keith to describe it except that he feels like he’s part of Voltron even when Voltron is not formed. Even when they’re not in their Lions. _ShiroHunkAlluraPidge_ are extensions of his own body. They don’t have to speak to know how to split up—Pidge and Hunk and Allura to the control room so Pidge can find Lance and they can retrieve any important information on the Iktauel. Shiro and Keith break off toward the prison cells, slicing through soldiers and guards like the weapons they are. They hurl themselves upon their enemies with a dream-like quality, like Keith is elevated above the battle even while he is all too well aware of its physicality. 

The hits don’t matter, though. The burn of laser fire, the sting of a claw, the raw cold of an edged blade slicing past Keith's armor’s defense. He feels it but moves around each blow like he’s water. Because for the first time in too long Keith can _feel_ him. He can feel _Lance_. A pull in his bones, and hook in his mind, drawing him forward against the tides. The soldiers and guards surround them, but Keith sees them as if they’re underwater—stupid with slowness and telegraphing all of their moves. Only Shiro seems to match Keith’s pace. 

They’re so close. And then the soldiers are at their feet, and there’s a vacuum of soundlessness and his own breathing ringing in Keith’s ears as they step into the prison hall where Lance is. They’re close now. 

“Turn left,” Pidge’s voice crackles with manic frenzy through the comms, the sound of ongoing battle raging on in the background. “Turn left! He’s there! He should be right there! We found him!” 

They’re so _close_. And then, finally, they’re _there_. 

At the tableau before them, Shiro makes a broken, wounded sound at the same time Keith lets out a pent-up, hoarse scream of rage. He runs forward to where Lance is hanging from the ceiling by swinging chains. He takes one moment, a small eternity, to loop one arm around the back of Lance’s thighs, brace Lance’s hips against his upper body, before Keith swings his blade and cuts the chains. 

All of Lance’s weight falls on him, too high in his arms. He feels his spine overextend dangerously backward, and he stumbles and almost topples on legs that are suddenly too numb to hold himself up, much less Lance. But Shiro is there, bracing Keith with his metal arm and steadying Lance with the other. Together, they lower Lance to the ground, taking moments they don’t have to assess the situation. 

Keith feels that he splits into two. One part of him, the fighter, catalogs the injuries and the barriers between them and escape. He carefully unwraps the chains from around swollen hands, hovers shaking fingers over Lance’s red and mangled feet, the skin split and bleeding from swelling. That part asks Pidge when they should expect the next wave of combatants and how much time they have to get Lance out. 

The other part of him is the panicking child, spinning in place to the endless and wordless internal scream.

He helplessly gives in to that voice for a moment. Keith lets out a terrified, frustrated sound as he sits back from his knees and carefully pulls Lance over his lap. He curls his arms around Lance, choking on another aimless cry when he feels how light Lance is and swears out loud to Lance that he’ll never let go again. Lance’s head lolls weakly against Keith’s chest, his matted hair fanning against his armor. 

The body in his arms doesn’t even look like Lance. The hands and feet are so split and swollen they don’t even look like hands and feet. He’s always been lanky, but in a way that is healthy and strong. Now he’s thin and skeletal, gaunt and _sickly_. He's flushed and clammy with fever. His beautiful, soft skin is pale and scaly, riddled with bruises and cuts, dried blood and unidentified filth. Both Shiro and Keith’s hands come away from his body dirty with dark blood. It’s like the Lance in his arms is a grotesque scarecrow of the real thing, a horror shop mannequin, hollowed out and unreal. 

And Lance is muzzled. Muzzled with a gaudy and bulky iron contraption that takes up the entirety of his lower face. Muzzled like—like a dog. Like a beast. Like he’s not worth any goddamned dignity. 

Shiro gags—at the sight and probably at the smell, Keith isn’t sure, but he’s stumbling away, crab crawling backward before getting to his feet. His eyes are wide and wild, lips pinched white, and it takes a minute too long for Keith to realize that Shiro is furious. 

“I’ll clear you guys a path,” Shiro says, voice deadened, face falling into an eerie blankness that is chillingly reminiscent to that of the clone Keith faced down all that time ago. 

And then Shiro is gone, his armored legs thundering down the corridor, crescendoing with a yell before the distant sound of battle resumes. 

“Lance,” Keith whispers, tries to clear the tight vice in his throat, tries to talk past it. “Lance,” he says louder. “Lance, Lance, please. Are you awake?” Are you _alive_? “Can you move?” 

His eyes flutter open, long lashes clumped with dried tears. Blue eyes rove around the room, foggy and unseeing. 

“Lance,” Keith tries again, voice cracking. “Lance, it’s me. It’s _us_. We’re taking you home. _Lance._ ” 

And then those blue eyes _finally_ focus in on him, and framed with bruises and cuts, eyes red from crying and screaming and who knows what else, Keith still finds himself sinking into those eyes—into Lance—like water. 

Keith feels a small smile pull at his lips, bitter and terrible and _relieved_ , because they have Lance. He’s here, he’s back, and Keith is never, ever going to let anything like this happen again. 

He feels a vibration, so gentle he almost believes it’s his imagination, against his gloved hands. Air whistles out of the pitiful excuse for ventilation etched into the metal that covers Lance’s nose. 

Lance is trying to talk. Trying to say something to Keith. Maybe he’s trying to cry. 

To scream. 

Keith’s not crying, he’s not, he barely feels anything past the tightness in his throat and the weak, hollow-boned shudder of Lance in his arms, but still hot tears slip quietly down his cheeks. He brushes Lance’s hair, longer than Keith has ever seen it, from those eyes before pulling Lance further into him, the _goddamned fucking muzzle_ clanking against the shoulder of Keith’s armor as he rocks Lance slowly back and forth. 

“I got you,” he says, inanely. “I got you. We’re here. _I’m_ here. I’m sorry, I’m _sorry_ , I got you.” 

He tilts his head down again, searching Lance’s gaze, and is surprised to find something lucid in it, something entirely Lance. The corners of his eyes crinkle, pronounced by the dirt and dried blood embedded in the creases and the dark half-moons under his bloodshot eyes, and Keith gets the impression that Lance is smiling, maybe even laughing, at him. Keith lets out a rushed breath of relief. Because this _is_ Lance, not some horror shop wax mannequin taking on the shape of his teammate. He’s alive. Muzzled, beaten, and _still_ the softest, kindest little jackass this side of the universe. 

This is, of course, exactly when Lance goes horrifyingly boneless in Keith’s arms and what little light is behind those eyes blinks out of existence as he goes unnaturally still.

Keith screams. He lays Lance’s head down, scrambles at Lance’s chest, ready to give compressions. 

“No,” he says, in sudden realization, fingers scrambling along the smooth metal of the muzzle. There’s no buckles and no hooks, no seams. It’s like the metal was welded together on Lance’s head. It's like it was made for him. 

And with it, Keith can’t _breathe_ for Lance, can’t _save him_. 

He shucks his armored gloves, bare fingers sliding along the muzzle, desperately hoping to feel a more nuanced locking mechanism, _anything_. 

It’s still smooth except for a welded vein along the back. Impossible to open. 

_“No!”_

He’s found Lance only to lose him and—

“Keith!” Hunk is there, on the comms but also on the other side of Lance’s body, filling Shiro’s vacated spot. He kneels across from Keith, armor scuffed and dented, blood trickling down the left side of his face, eyes blown wide in a look that probably mirrors Keith’s own. But Keith can only spare him a split second of regard before he returns his attention to Lance. The tips of his fingers sting and bruise, his short fingernails bend back as he keeps skidding uselessly over an impervious surface. The metal has gone hot beneath his hands. He leans over Lance, face hovering over where his mouth is should be. 

“Keith, stop! He’s alive! He’s alive, but we have to go. _Stop!_ ” Hunk grabs one of his wrists, forcefully placing Keith’s bared hand against Lance’s throat. 

Keith hears something then, a wounded and pitiful outcry, and has the distant realization that it’s probably him and struggles to swallow it down. At first, he can’t feel anything, and he’s ready to throw Hunk off and pry apart the unyielding metal of the muzzle with his hands. But Hunk doesn’t let up, and Keith feels it—thready and faint, like the distant and weak thrumming of bird wings against a cage, but there. He feels Lance’s lifeblood beneath his fingers and Hunk’s warmth and life on the back of his hand, wide palm enveloping his, and he feels it—the hum of their bond, the one between them and the one with the Lions, Voltron, rise in his mind. For the first time since Lance was taken, he feels their bond as _whole_ again. Wounded, fragile, but _whole_. 

“Keith,” Hunk says. “I’m scared, too.” He doesn’t _sound_ scared. His voice is hard, his face set with determination. Keith suddenly recalls when they were all floating in space without their Lions all those months ago, tethered together but lost and increasingly hopeless, and Hunk was so brave. Talking about fear like it was matter-of-fact like it wasn’t anything to be ashamed of but something to embrace, something to _use_. In this moment Hunk is Earth, he’s the leg, holding up their weight, immovable, indomitable. “I’m scared, too. But it’s almost over, we have to keep going.” 

“Okay,” Keith croaks, not even managing more than a whisper. “Okay,” he repeats, louder this time, the familiar anger-tinged determination settling like sharpened steel in his bones. “You’re right. We can deal with this later. We have to go.” 

“That’s our boss,” Hunk says but doesn’t smile. 

“I’ll carry Lance—” 

“I will,” Hunk interrupts, already gently working his arms beneath Lance’s body. “I can carry him for longer, and I trust you to get us out of here.” 

Keith licks his lips, fingers itching to keep cradling Lance against him, to keep feeling his pulse, the little movements of his chest. To feel Lance _there_. But he knows that Hunk is right. 

“I trust you, too,” Keith says, taking a step back and drawing his blade. 

Hunk smiles then. It’s small, just a weak lift to the right corner of his mouth, but it’s full of relief and tender hope. At least, Keith thinks so. It’s what _he_ feels, anyway. 

“I know,” Hunk says. 

Keith steps forward, Hunk and Lance at his back, and refuses to look down at the bloody footprints he makes on the floor. 

“Let’s go home.” 

tbc


	3. Chapter 3

Lance doesn’t wake up for a long time. 

They only have one healing pod among them—the rest are still being manufactured in the Atlas. They barely get Lance in the suit and pod before his life fades completely. 

They had to remove the muzzle first.

Pidge and Hunk take over that part—their hands far more used to the delicate, small movements required to work on computers and machinery. Except it’s not computers and machinery but Lance’s _face_. In the light of Black’s makeshift med bay, Keith gets a better look at the contraption and feels his skin crawl. It’s _wrong_ , wrong like Lotor had been wrong, wrong like the corrupted quintessence of the Druids. 

Wrong like Shiro’s clone had been, in the end, with his face a portrait of hatred set in the frame of the only person who had ever shown Keith any kindness before space. Before _RedLancePidgeHunkAlluraCoranBlack_. 

The muzzle is dark metal, and a cursory inspection by Pidge and Hunk confirms Keith’s suspicion that it had been welded onto Lance’s head. Custom fitted. The act itself had been torture—Keith can see burns along his head and neck, small sections of singed hair and infected skin where they hadn’t been careful with whatever they used to weld it shut. 

It makes Keith _rage_. It was clear that they did this to Lance either because Lance gave them the information they needed or because Lance _wouldn’t_. It was also clear that they were no longer going to try. It must have felt so hopeless to Lance. When his captors thought they could get intel out of Lance, when they thought he was of use, then whatever they put Lance through had to feel like it had a purpose, like it had meaning, no matter how twisted and painful. 

With the muzzle, the pain was pointless. It was pain for pain’s sake, for the sick satisfaction of someone else and just because they could. That, more than anything before, had to feel utterly devastating for Lance. Keith swallows back tightness in his throat just trying to imagine the _hopelessness_. 

It takes seconds, minutes that they don’t have. Lance’s feeble heartbeat grows fainter and fainter during that time, a fade to black that Keith can’t accept. Pidge _finally_ removes the muzzle with a strangled battle cry. Hunk, having held on up to this point, throws up at the sight of raw skin and new blood stuck on the inside of the muzzle. Keith and Pidge tug him out of the way as Allura and Shiro haul Lance into the pod. Coran’s gloved fingers fly over the control panel. The pod glows. Fingers of frost and mist creep over Lance, crawls and settles behind the glass, and they're left staring through the fog at a specter of their friend. 

Lance doesn’t wake up for a long time. 

It takes a full week after Lance is rescued for the pod to release him. The Lions are as far away from the Iktauel as they can manage for now. The team takes turns standing vigil over Lance, even though Coran constantly assures them that the projected time for Lance waking up doesn’t change. 

The whole team is there as the timer ticks down, as frost recedes like a slow waking from a nightmare, and Lance’s slack face comes into focus behind the glass. It hisses open, and they help him sit up and lift him out of the pod. All of them. It’s probably too much, an unbearable sensory overload with their bodies and noises pressing in on Lance at all sides. Everyone knows that they should back off and let Hunk support Lance as they wait for their friend’s paradigm to shift, but just for this one second it’s like none of them can bear to _not_ touch him. 

Lance shudders, paled lips parting against Hunk's shoulder, breathing too rapid. He looks around wildly, eyes glazed and confused. 

“Lance,” Shiro tries. 

“ _Hermano_ ,” Hunk croons. 

“Lance,” Keith whispers. And it’s him Lance’s gaze eventually settles on. Well, Lance more looks through Keith than at him, and still Keith feels the world spinning out from his feet as he sinks into a well of blue. 

Lance shudders again, teeth clacking, mouth trembling, probably freezing from the pod, freezing and terrified and tired, and it’s only natural that Hunk brings up his other arm to envelope Lance in a hug. Hell, Keith wants to give Lance a hug and Keith has only hugged, like, two whole people before in his entire life. 

Lance seems to melt in the warmth of Hunk’s arms, a look like peace and relief very briefly fluttering over his features. 

And then Lance screams. 

They have to sedate him and move him to Keith's bed in Black's bunker, where he sleeps another twelve varga. There's an odd mix of tension and relief as they watch the steady rise and fall of Lance's chest, and Keith finds himself timing his own breathing to Lance's rhythm. Black's song is a distant rumble in Keith's head, and he wonders if the others hear Black’s song as he does, like the rising pitch of wind gathering rain for a storm. Maybe Black just sings for Keith. 

The next time Lance surfaces into consciousness, he’s more lucid, more Lance. He wakes during Keith’s shift in their rotation. Keith doesn’t even realize it at first, too busy fussing with Lance’s pillow and sheets like he’d seen Hunk do a million times though Keith could never actually see anything _wrong_ with the bedclothes. He happens to look down to half-lidded blue eyes. 

“You about to kiss me awake, Prince Charming?” 

“With my fist,” Keith promises solemnly before he even really thinks about it. Lance sighs, perhaps a little more world-weary than he meant, but the corners of his mouth tremble with a tired grin. 

“The romance is dead,” he laments. 

“I’m really glad you’re not,” Keith blurts out and then immediately squinches his face in a grimace, wishing he can take it back. It’s probably too soon to talk about, isn't it? Keith remembers Lance's delirious, terrified screams when he first got out of the healing pod. Did Keith just stupidly trigger another relapse? Honestly, Keith is okay with never talking about what happened again. He doesn’t want to talk about the blood, and the bruises, the infection and the raw skin left behind by the muzzle. He doesn’t want to talk about the months of hollow aching, of frantic searching. He is just so goddamned relieved that Lance is _here_ that it fills up his head and he can’t think past it. 

Dark eyelashes flutter as Lance blinks up at him before his expression melts. 

“Oh,” Lance whispers hoarsely. 

“Oh _no_ ,” Keith says, panicked as tears fall silently down hollowed cheeks. “Holy shit, don’t _cry_ —what did I say? What do I _do_?” He takes the sleeve of the shirt he’s wearing, hooking the material over his thumb and forefinger and using it to blot at the wetness on Lance’s cheeks in a vain effort to push the tears back _in_. 

Lance snorts beneath his frantic ministrations, and it breaks into outright _giggling_. His laughter is muted, still too weak for the loud, boisterous laughs that used to ring throughout the Castle of Lions. And it quickly devolves into a bout of wheezing coughs. But the tears stop, so Keith decides to count it as a win even though his heart drops as Lance struggles to regain his breath. 

“You know what, Keith,” Lance manages between gasps. “I think this one might be real.” 

“What?” 

“You’re such a sucker for crying,” Lance continues. “Hunk gives you a little cry, and what do you do? You break out of the Garrison and break into a _prison camp_ for him. You just tried to, like, _physically fight_ my tears away.” 

Keith scowls, picking at his sleeve. The hem is still damp. “I just—shut up.” 

“Nice one,” Lance scoffs, trying to situate himself on the bed and scowling at the room at large until Keith adjusts his pillow for him, pulling and fluffing until Lance sort of just sinks into it and, huh, maybe this weird fussing over bedclothes thing works after all? “I hope you have kids. You’d be a huge pushover, and they’d be _terrors_ ,” he says with not a little delight. 

“Can we please stop talking about this?” 

“Which part? The crying part or the Daddy Keith part?” 

Keith cringes. “All of it. Let’s just—you know what. You’re probably hungry. Or thirsty. Do you need anything?” 

Lance tilts his head, teasing evaporating and leaving behind dark circles and pallid skin. “Maybe the next go round,” he says, voice syrupy with fatigue. “Tired.” 

“Then sleep,” Keith says.

Brows furrow, causing a small crease in his forehead as Lance pouts, clearly fighting to keep his heavy eyes open. “Don’t tell me what to do.” 

Keith rolls his own eyes. “OK, then, don’t sleep. Stay awake.” 

Lance’s pout deepens and he’s _such a toddler_. Keith should be annoyed at the immaturity, not... _softened_ by how cute the pout is. Seriously, what is wrong with him? 

“Not boss o’ me,” Lance slurs, bruised lids finally closing, long lashes still clumped with forgotten tears. 

“Kinda am.” 

“Shut up. Tryin’ ta sleep.” 

Keith stays utterly still even though everything in him is itching to hail the others, to scream at them that Lance is _awake_. But he can see Lance’s eyes rolling behind closed lids, the twitch in his shoulders and he doesn’t want to make any noise until Lance is fully asleep. 

“I think this one is real,” Lance repeats suddenly, startling Keith, though his eyes remain closed. 

“What’s real?” Keith whispers. 

“This dream.” 

Keith swallows thickly. “It’s real.”

A sliver of blue peeks at him as Lance quirks his lips. “That’s what I just said.”

“No,” Keith insists, louder this time, making Lance open his eyes just a little more. He needs Lance to _know_. “This is real. We got you. You’re here with us.” 

“With you?” 

“With me.” 

Keith watches Lance watch him, searching for something Keith doesn't know how to name. Lance’s hand moves from beneath the covers and Keith, despite his racing heart, doesn’t hesitate to intertwine his rough fingers with Lance’s thin and warm ones. 

“It’s real,” Keith repeats earnestly. “You’re here now.” 

But Lance is already asleep, Keith’s hand still firmly in his. 

It’s something Lance will ask over the next several days. Randomly and intermittently, to no discernable pattern. At least not to Keith. 

_“Are you real?”_

Because this simple question leads to disturbing images conjured from the darkest corners of his imagination, Keith tries a little too hard not to think about _why_ Lance keeps asking it. Instead, for some reason he can't fathom, he finds himself thinking of Shiro's clone. He wonders how many times the clone questioned what was real, just like Lance. Was the clone ever self-aware enough to question his existence? Did he believe himself to be Shiro, even right up to the end? And then Keith finds himself wondering if Shiro—the real Shiro—ever did the same after he was rescued—both times. Does Shiro still question whether or not he's real, with his borrowed body that barely contains a soul that skated the fringes of existence for a small eternity? 

Keith should probably talk to Shiro about that. He should probably ask more than a simple, _"are you OK?"_

 _“Are you real?”_ Lance will ask, over and over. 

_“Yes,”_ the team will answer, over and over. Sometimes they will say _"this is real"_ to Lance, even when he doesn’t ask, as if asserting their own reality. One where Lance is real and _here_ , with them. 

The Lance with them is not a clone, though he moves like a wraith for the first day or two, keeping to his bed with blankets wedged between whitened knuckles, flinching at sudden sounds and wincing at bright lights. Their bond is whole again, but it is weak, riddled through with doubt and anxiety and an endless cloud of pain. Lance went through a lot—what, they don’t know and can only guess because Lance won’t really talk about it. 

Because Lance is in Black’s impromptu med bay—AKA Keith’s sleeping quarters—Keith spends most of his time with Lance. Reading over Blade reports and updates from the Garrison while Lance dozes, dozing himself more often than not, the months of high stress and little sleep catching up to him. They've moved from a small planet to an even smaller moon a whole system away, taking extreme caution in their vulnerable state. Because they're stationary, the team pops in and out. Some keep vigil alongside Keith, talking gently with Lance when he's awake enough to mumble out half-dreaming words. Or holding his hand when nightmares make silent tears dampen his cheeks. 

With Lance questioning reality, the team makes the unspoken but unanimous decision to keep him under twenty-four-hour watch. Hunk worries about Lance's food intake. Pidge decides she's more limpet than girl and takes to lounging beside or _on_ Lance, using his stomach as a makeshift desk for her laptop. She doesn't do much work around Lance, though, and instead, they watch old Altean soap operas together until Lance falls back asleep. 

Coran, of course, videos in as soon as Lance is awake. He regales Lance with story after story. It's clear that Lance is only listening to a small percentage of the inane tales, but that's the point. Coran can talk without expecting a response, and Lance doesn't have think for a while. Allura is the opposite, sitting beside Lance and carding her fingers through his hair, letting him talk to her. He doesn't say anything about what he went through. Instead, he mostly talks about beaches and rain and holidays with his family. Allura listens and is dutifully fascinated by things like chickens laying eggs and Pop Tarts and Wheel of Fortune. Shiro starts out reading to Lance but ends up slumped beside his charge before he's ten pages in. Keith walks in on Shiro nearly falling off the bed, dead asleep, with Lance tucked under his arm, and Lance's fingers curled into Shiro's shirt. 

The ache that overtakes Keith at the sight is too complicated to name. It's a yearning in his marrow, a restless sort of jealousy in the pit of his stomach, and yet a warm, depthless satisfaction suffuses his heart to see the two people he loves the most _happy_. He sits on the floor beside them, rests his head on the edge of the cot, and stands guard while they sleep. 

It's almost the end of day three after Lance is out of the pod when Keith is sitting in the corner opposite of Lance’s cot, head tilted back and resting against the wall, floating between waking and dreaming with the datapad leaning abandoned against his stomach when he hears shuffling. He doesn’t think anything of it at first, because Lance has grown more and more active over the past several hours, a good sign that he’s about ready to get out of bed. But then he hears a quiet footstep and feels a whisper of clothes against his arm and his eyes fly open.

Lance is wobbling his way out the door and towards Black’s cockpit—towards the exit. His pajamas hang loosely on him, the waistband of his pants so low Keith can make out the jut of his hipbone. “Lance,” he cautions, licking his lips, not wanting to startle him, not wanting to push him away. “Lance, where are you going?” 

Lance leans on the doorframe, already out of breath. He doesn’t meet Keith’s eyes, embarrassed at his weakness. The pod had healed him, but it could not replace months of malnutrition and sleep deprivation. It’ll take a long time to build up his strength again. 

“Going to see Red,” he rasps out. “She keeps—I miss her.” 

Hunk would probably tell Lance that he needs to stay in bed longer, that Red is too far away in his current state, would probably put up a valiant fight before eventually giving in to Lance’s demands, as he always did. Shiro and Allura would probably say the same thing but, unlike Hunk, would not cave to Lance’s puppy eyes and wheedling.

So he knows that he shouldn’t let Lance go, but he also has never been good at telling Lance no. Not really. 

“I’ll walk with you.”

Lance doesn’t protest, only surges forward with an exhausted huff, leaving Keith to scramble to pack his datapad, their bayards, and a few other things in a small backpack. He hops just behind Lance, trying to pull on his boots while he walks. He hears Lance chuckle ahead of him and hides his own smile into his shoulder. 

They make their slow way down Black’s ramp, Lance’s hands thrown out to the sides like he’s walking a balance beam instead of a ramp large enough for them to walk side-by-side on. It’s dark and cloudy with full puddles gleaming in the wan light below them. Their fire and campsite had long been abandoned, the other Paladins probably retreating to their Lions once the rain came. Shiro must have joined with one of the others instead of risking disturbing Lance or Keith during their rest. At the bottom, Lance’s knees finally buckle and because Keith has been watching like a hawk he’s able to catch Lance before he can even begin to fall. 

“OK,” Lance pants, damp forehead on Keith’s shoulder and his warm breath ghosting across Keith’s collarbone. “OK who parked Red so far away?” 

Keith blinks, looking from the top of Lance’s matted hair to Red, who is parked so close Black they’re almost touching. 

“Red parks herself,” he decides to say. 

Apparently, Lance is too tired to even lift his head because he just sort of swivels until he’s looking up at Keith, Keith’s shirt bunched beneath his temple and cheekbone. “What? Really?” 

Keith gives a wry shrug, watching Lance’s head bob up and down with it. “She sort of drives herself, too?”

“What do you mean? Why are you saying that like a question?” 

“Are you going to let me carry you?” 

“I don’t know,” Lance pouts. “You haven’t even _asked_.” 

“Is it OK if I carry you?” 

Silence. 

“Lance?” 

“I’m thinking about it.” 

Keith scoffs. “Could you maybe think faster?” 

“What? Got somewhere to be, hotshot? Want to get back to your angry brooding?” 

“I don’t _brood_ ,” Keith snarks, then pauses as he thinks about it. “Much. Anymore.” 

Lance laughs, a sharp rush of air through his nose as he lifts his head from Keith and tries to walk forward again. He makes it to Red, who lowers her head and opens her mouth for the ramp to descend for them. 

“Huh,” Lance says as he toes at the ramp with his now-muddy Blue Lion slippers. “I don’t think I asked her to do that.” 

“Yeah, that seems about right.” 

“Don’t pick on her,” Lance mumbles, scowling up at the ramp like it was Mt. Everest. He sighs when it starts to drizzle on them, tilting his head up to embrace the rain even as his shoulders slump at how daunting the last leg of his journey has become. “She’s a strong, independent woman and she don’t need no Paladin.” 

“Maybe,” Keith says, temporarily mesmerized by the way the rain falls around Lance in the halo of Red’s light. His hair is jagged and dirty, the skin under his eyes are more bruises than anything, and he’s walking like he’s an old man. Still, Keith can’t help but think how stupidly pretty he is with the night and the rain kissing his skin. “I think she _wants_ you, though.”

Lance turns to face Keith, smiling over his shoulder, lashes clumped by the steadily-increasing rain. 

“You need to get out of the rain. Hunk will actually kill me if you get sick.” 

Lance toes at the ramp again. His legs are shaking. “Hunk Garret: the most terrifying of us all. Keith, I need—I don’t think I can climb this.” 

Keith doesn’t wait for Lance to change his mind. He braces one arm below sharp shoulder blades and stoops to swing his other arm beneath Lance’s knees and has Lance tight against his chest and is ascending up the ramp to the tune of Lance’s squawking in a matter of seconds. 

“I was thinking _piggy-back_ style,” Lance grouses, clutching at Keith’s shirt with a white-knuckled death grip. 

“This was faster,” Keith says. “I was serious about Hunk.” 

“I was, too,” Lance agrees. “But _still_. Did you actually get even taller?” 

“And more grizzled,” Keith assures. 

“Oh my _God_ ,” Lance mumbles, relinquishing his grip with one hand to hide his pinkened cheeks. “No, that’s—that’s illegal you can’t just take the stupid things I say and use them against me, who said you could? You were supposed to forget that.” 

“Forget about our bonding moment? That’s _your_ thing. I wouldn’t want to take it from you.” 

“ _You didn’t remember me first!_ ” 

“So you’re saying you _do_ remember—” 

“Red!” Lance exclaims suddenly over Keith as he sets Lance to his feet and holds his elbow while Lance plops into the pilot’s chair. “My love. My fire. You can stop nagging me, now. Besides, it was Keith who was keeping me from you. Why couldn’t you nag _him_?” 

There’s a swell of something, just below Black’s song in Keith’s head. Distant, less the roar of a volcano and more the crackle of a campfire and Keith knows he’s hearing an echo of an echo of Red’s bond with Lance. 

It almost sounds like a purr. 

...She never purred for _Keith_.

“Red says… she doesn’t… purr…” Lance’s voice has gone airy and tired again. His thin frame is shaking against the pilot’s chair. Keith resists the urge to facepalm. A blanket. He should have brought a blanket. And pillows. Hunk would have remembered a blanket and pillows, Keith thinks sourly. 

“Quit second-hand mind reading. Keep to your own head hole,” Keith snipes off-handedly, looking around for something he can use to cover Lance. There’s probably stuff in Red’s cargo hold, but Keith doesn’t want to leave him when he’s looking that pale and weak. 

“Red can’t… help it if… you’re loud,” Lance wheezes, closing his eyes.

“Catch your breath first,” Keith says, trying not to sound worried and probably failing given the glare Lance sends his way. “And then you can sass me all you want.” 

“Mission… accepted… boss.” 

“ _Now_ I’m the boss of you when it’s convenient.” 

Lance’s lips twitch and curl into a smile before pain overtakes his features, and he tilts his head to dig his temple into the cool leather of the chair. 

“Headache?” Keith whispers, waiting for Lance to nod minutely. “Hunk’s going to kill me.” 

Another half-smile. Keith’s on a roll today. 

“Wanted… Red…” 

“I’ll comm someone, ask them to get medicine for you,” Keith says, reaching for the console. 

“No,” Lance says, voice a little stronger. Keith looks over his shoulder to meet the tired scowl aimed his way head on. 

“Lance.” 

“Keith.” 

Before Keith can argue, there’s a flash of light and two hundred and sixty pounds of smelly fur shoving him out of the way to get to Lance. 

“Kosmo!” Keith calls, horrified when he sees the big wolf place his paws on either side of Lance’s seat and start licking at Lance’s face. He slides back toward them on his knees, frantically pulls at Kosmo’s shoulders, to pretty much no avail, when a sound makes him freeze. 

A laugh. It’s reedy and raspy, the sound of a campfire dying or the breeze in the desert in the early morning, but Lance is laughing. Keith didn’t think he’d get to hear that sound so soon. Just a few weeks ago, he was beginning to think he’d never hear Lance laughing again. 

Keith looks up to see spindly fingers buried in Kosmo’s thick fur, Lance’s face pushed to the side of Kosmo’s, eyes squinched shut and shoulder trying futilely to protect his ear and the side of his jaw from Kosmo’s slobbery kisses. He’s holding onto the wolf for his life, Keith has no doubt he’d be putting a strain on Kosmo’s ribs if Lance weren’t so weak at the moment. 

“Who’s a handsome boy?” Lance says, turning his head so Kosmo can attempt to lavish his other ear with drooly affection. “Did you miss me? I missed you, yes I did, I missed you. Where have you been?” 

“Banned,” Keith says, dryly. “Because he could crush you.” 

Lance gasps, hands moving to scratch behind Kosmo’s big, floofy ears. The wolf immediately turns into a pool of useless putty, slumping further into Lance and wagging his tail furiously. Keith looks on, unimpressed at his fearsome space wolf’s Achilles heel. 

“Keith is a meanie, isn’t he? Doesn’t he know you also give the best cuddles, yes you do, handsome, yes you do.” 

Keith fakes gagging at the baby talk and glares at his wolf when Kosmo tosses him a superior look over his shoulder. That attention-grabbing little _quiznacker_. He draws the line when Kosmo tries to climb onto the pilot’s chair to be closer to Lance, smothering the boy in the process with his ridiculously dirty and smelly fur. 

“Alright, _no_ ,” Keith huffs, standing up and wrapping his arms around Kosmo’s chest. Or trying to. At this point both the wolf and Lance are kind of one unidentifiable, tangled ball and the back of Keith’s knuckles skim across Lance’s skin in the attempt. 

Fighting down the heat in his cheeks, Keith tries to haul Kosmo off of Lance. Which is proving more difficult than expected. 

“Lance. Let go.” 

“But. Soft.” Lance’s voice is barely audible under the hopeless lump of space wolf. 

“But. Suffocation,” Keith responds in the same whining tone. Lance’s arms let go of the wolf, but who knows if it’s voluntary or because he’s passed out from lack of air. 

More reedy laughter sounds below Kosmo, and Keith presses a smile into the wolf’s fur. “Good boy,” he murmurs lowly to the wolf. “You’ve done good. Now move.” 

Keith tries to lift the wolf away. Kosmo doesn’t budge. Lance continues to laugh, helpless beneath them both. 

“How are you holding on?” Keith gasps incredulously. “You don’t have thumbs!” He braces one foot on the chair next to Lance’s thigh and _heaves_. 

Kosmo suddenly goes boneless, and Keith ends up pulling way harder than needed and overbalancing. He crashes backward, head barely missing the console, with a ton of space wolf on top of him. Kosmo’s four paws are straight up towards the ceiling, his tail thumping against Keith’s legs. Between clumps of fur Keith can make out Lance doubled over in the pilot’s chair, laughing so hard there is no sound as he wipes at his eyes. 

“Oh my God,” Lance wheezes, glancing down at Keith while he clutches at his ribs, the laughter clearly sapping whatever energy he had left, but Lance doesn’t look like he cares. “You guys should… be… a… comedy act.” 

“Yeah, yeah,” Keith huffs, poking Kosmo in the ribs. “Off, you doof.” Kosmo blinks off of Keith with a shine of stardust, reappearing next to Lance, sitting in a dignified and professional position with a dumb doggy grin at Keith. 

“I’m going to find some blankets. Stay, Kosmo.” 

Kosmo flicks his ears in acknowledgment, chest puffing with his important assignment, his demeanor the picture of dutiful watchdog. For all of five seconds, anyway, because Lance ruins it by reaching over and scratching behind Kosmo's ears and the wolf melts once again, flopping over like he's drunk.

“We’re fine,” Lance says, breaths finally evening out again, eyelids already drooping. 

Keith finds some pillows and blankets in Red’s bunker. They still, somehow, smell like Lance. When he re-enters the cockpit, Lance is asleep, slumped over to the right side of his chair. Kosmo is at his feet—literally laying on his feet. The wolf’s ears perk when Keith re-enters, but he doesn’t move. Keith tries to sit Lance up in a more comfortable position and covers him with a blanket. Then Keith lays down his own makeshift bedding next to Kosmo, who grumbles at him in friendly greeting. 

Keith curls into his wolf’s warm side and buries his face into Kosmo’s fur. He leaves behind a damp trail with his quiet tears. He doesn’t even know why he’s crying. 

“You’re a good boy,” he says again. “Thank you.” 

And they doze like that, uncomfortable but warm, lulled by the campfire crackle of Red’s muted song. 

tbc

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading! I hope you are liking it! :) (...because I'm not really sure where this is going LMAO rip) I'm thinking maybe one or two more chapters, possibly. Since I'm still in the idea stage for the next chapter or two, let me know if you want to see anything! I just may be able to work it in. ;)

**Author's Note:**

> @wonderingtheblue on Tumblr and wonderingtheblue#8362 on Discord - come say hi! 
> 
> Your comments have been beautiful and so encouraging. Thank you! :)


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